Personal Adventures

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

IT is a matter of common belief just now, especially among those who do not often read essays, that the essay is pretty much a thing of the past. There was, of course, a day of glory for it: there was even a day when it held the top of the market, or nearly that. But this was a good vague while ago. Very few people, we are assured, try to write essays nowadays, and when they do the results are not worth much. Critical essays commonly deal with books and authors that everybody knows about, or else with books and authors that nobody wants to know about. What do we care for John Doe’s opinion of Shakespeare, or Richard Roe’s remarks on Lodovico Castelvetro ? As for the discursive essay, it is folly, at this day of the world, to adopt such a medium for creative writing. What’s the matter with the novel ? There is your true modern vehicle for eloquence, or sentiment, or philosophy ; and “ something doing ” besides.

I.

In a commercial sense, the essay does, just now, lie between the devil and the deep sea, the special article and the novel. Few American periodicals have room for it. In the publisher’s catalogue it holds a place of dignified obscurity next door to the equally sequestered item of verse. It is not advertised in the newspapers or displayed in book-shop windows: a backhanded compliment, if one chooses, to the incorruptible quality of the audience it is destined to reach. To the quality and constancy of that audience, in fact, the essay owes its continued and healthy existence. Not yet has it been absorbed in the novel or displaced by the special article, though its quiet merits have been somewhat obscured to the ordinary eye by the numbers and showiness of its neighbors. Surely people ought not, without fair investigation, to be persuaded that there is nothing of account now being done in this field.

Here, for instance, are three volumes of essays, all quite unlike as to theme and treatment, all genuine contributions to literature, all ordained in the nature of things for a success of appreciation by comparatively few readers. The newspapers and “ critical ” organs will have something brief and affable to say of them ; but they will not be much talked about either there or elsewhere. Nevertheless, they will make their place and hold it.

The three chapters of Mr. Walkley’s book¹ were originally delivered as lectures before the Royal Institution, but they bear few marks of the platform. The writer’s theme is primarily the criticism of current plays, but his conclusions are of broad application to all criticism. The first paper, on The Ideal Spectator, has to do, somewhat strictly, with the conditions of the theatre. The drama, says Mr. Walkley, differs from other forms of literary art in addressing itself directly to a crowd. Further, “ a crowd forms a new entity, with a mind and character of its own. . . . The qualities in which the members of a crowd differ from one another disappear, are mutually cancelled, while the qualities which they have in common are intensified by contact. The qualities in which men differ are principally, of course, the conscious elements of character, the fruit of education, of varying hereditary conditions, and the intelligence. The qualities, on the other hand, in which they resemble one another are principally the unconscious or sub-conscious qualities, the primary instincts, feelings, and passions of the race. . . . The crowd has the credulity, the absence of judicial faculty, the uncontrolled violence of feeling, of a child.”

To be brief, Mr. Walkley does not find his ideal spectator in the crowd, or in the average spectator, or in the “ amateur of culture,” but in the spectator who achieves a mood compact of intellectual detachment and sympathetic surrender. To compass this feat “ requires not only an effort of the will, a special motive, but training and special aptitude.” These are obviously among the essential qualities, though, as we are presently shown, not the only essential qualities, of the professional dramatic critic. He must be also an artist. “ Accepting the word ‘ creation,’ we must apply it to all producers of literary art, whether they be poets or novelists or playwrights or critics. They are all creators, and what they all create is æsthetic feeling. And the raw material out of which they all create this is the same, namely, themselves. Criticism, like any other art — whatever else it may be — is a mode of self-expression. M. Anatole France has given a famous description of criticism as ‘ The adventures of a soul among masterpieces,’ and he has added : “ In order to be frank, the critic ought to say, Gentlemen, I am about to speak of myself à propos of Shakespeare, or Racine, or Pascal, or Goethe — by no means a bad opportunity.’ ” Apropos of dramatic criticism, Mr. Walkley speaks of himself to excellent purpose in the present volume, of which the final chapter, on Old and New Criticism, is by no means less valuable, though slightly more technical, than the others.

The Adventures of a Personality among Masterpieces would be an admirable title for Mr. Sedgwick’s book of critical Essays.² These papers contain much excellent criticism, even in the narrower sense. They are the outcome, that is, of an intellectual detachment which is a sufficient safeguard against the expression of mere whim. But this is not all. The fact of itself might win them a sort of recognition ; what gives them carrying power is their quality of personal sympathy, their character as “ a mode of self-expression,” their literary excellence, in short. As an essay in prose criticism the paper on Macaulay seems altogether the best of them; indeed, altogether the best appraisal, outside of Bagehot, which has yet been offered. What Mr. Sedgwick says of Macaulay in public and private life is equally good, but we can quote only a few sentences from his estimate of Macaulay as a writer : —

“ The essays are the work of a rhetorician, the greatest, perhaps, in English literature. One defect in that literature, as compared with Latin literature, has been a lack of rhetoric. The great masters of English prose, Milton and Burke, appeal to the imagination. Their language is sensuous and adorned, but they address themselves to the intellect ; they charge their speech with thought; they are careless that they lay burdens upon their readers ; they are indifferent that they outstride the crowd. The rhetorician — a Cicero, a Bossuet — tries to spare his readers ; he wishes to be always thronged by the multitude. So it is with Macaulay. He says nothing that everybody cannot comprehend at once. He exerts all his powers to give his readers as little to do as possible ; he drains his memory to find decorations to catch their eye and fix their attention. He presents everything in brilliant images. He writes to the eye and the ear. He has in mind the ordinary Briton ; he does not write for a sect nor for a band of disciples. He is always the orator talking to men who are going to vote at the close of his speech.”

The tone of most of the other papers is more clearly determined by personal sympathy ; one or two of them, indeed, belong to the discursive rather than the purely critical order. Now and then, as in the essay on English and French Literature, there is a little touch of petulance which reminds us pleasantly that we are not observing the adventures of a mere intellect. What makes for an effective personality in literature ? — not learning nor logical faculty, nor cleverness of hand or fancy. These are qualities which, joined with perseverance, can do almost anything outside of art, and nothing at all in it. Nor is cultivated queerness of great account. Mr. Sedgwick, in an interesting essay on D’ Annunzio, has this to say of the Symbolistes :

“ These writers are not wholly purged from all desire for self-assertion; they wish room wherein openly to display themselves, and to this end they have drawn apart out of the shadow of famous names. . . . They hold individuality sacred, and define it to be that which man has in himself unshared by any other, and deny the name to all that he has in common with other men.” Such is the creed upon which, consciously or unconsciously, most of the little coteries found their work. It is so much easier to be queer than to be original, let us assert that queerness is the only originality. Let us tune the lyre as it pleases us, whence, if we are also bold enough to hold it upside down, and render some familiar air backwards, we may startle the world into admitting that this must be, indeed, the music of the future. “ In truth,” says Mr. Sedgwick, still speaking of the symbolist movement, “ these Frenchmen do not reveal their personality. It may indeed be doubted if they have any such encumbrance. In its place they have a bunch of theories tied up with the ribbon of their literary experience; and the exhalations of it, as if it were a bunch of flowers, they suffer to transpire through their pages.”

The essayist does not fail to state plainly his belief in the overwhelming importance of true personality in art. So, almost at the end of the paper on Thackeray, we come upon this passage: “ A novelist, however, in the end, must be judged according to a common human measure. ... It is the character of the novelist that provides tissue for his novels ; there is no way by which the novelist can sit like an absentee god and project into the world a work that tells no tales of him. Every man casts his work in his own image. Only a great man writes a great novel; only a mean man writes a mean novel. A novel is as purely personal a thing as a handshake, and is to be judged by a simple standard which everybody can understand.”

If it is true that a novelist cannot hide behind his narrative, it is more obviously true that an essayist is at the mercy of his discourse. The process of selfbetrayal is even more summary ; a dozen sentences are enough, perhaps, to lay him before us, mind and soul, or at least the true outline of him ; and it is at our own risk that we go farther. A writer of treatises may remain an unknown quantity ; for his business is only to pile one stone upon another, and there is no trace of human emotion in the shaft which is finally reared. But an essay, next to a poem, is the most directly human of all literary products.

II.

Not long ago this department had occasion to remark somewhat plaintively, “ It is a pity that no important volume of discursive essays has been published in America since the day of the Autocrat.” Happily, with the advent of The Gentle Reader,³ this has ceased to be the truth, if it was the truth. We had been, at the time, expressing our pleasure in Mr. Chesterton’s The Defendant. Mr. Crothers’s book is quite as good. It is not, to be sure, so sharply brilliant, so compact, so startling, so well designed to win over readers of fiction. Its aggressiveness is ironical, it is gently and affectionately whimsical, its divagations manage to lead one just where (if he had thought of it) he would have wished to go. Its leisurely speculations are never, as not uncommonly happens with Mr. Chesterton’s, merely extravagant offshoots of an exuberant fancy. With all their quiet whimsicality, the essays are never merely whimsical. They are seasoned with a kindly urbanity; and they give one the sense of companionship with a personality of singular humanness and sweetness. Mr. Crothers, in his capacity of Gentle Reader, has no high opinion of formal criticism. “ Appreciation of literature,” he says, “ is the getting at an author, so that we like what he is, while all that he is not is irrelevant.” This is, after all, much like Arnold’s definition of criticism as “ the art of seeing the object as in itself it really is.” The natural boundaries of an object are a part of one’s view of it. What he is not will go as far as what he is toward endearing the Gentle Reader to his audience.

The discursive essay has always been among the important by-products of the art of the English novelist. One may cull Roundabout Papers almost at will from the pages of Thackeray; and, later, the novel has pressed into its service talents primarily suited to the essay form. How many persons would have continued for a series of years to peruse Mr. Meredith’s essays on The Whimsies of Human Character and Fate, or Mr. James’s discourses on The Subtleties of Sophistication, if these writers had not vouchsafed the grateful accommodation of the active episode and the concrete figure ?

III.

And, much as it has been discredited by criticism, the novel of purpose is still hardly less common than the novel of analysis. Readers of No. 5 John Street will not be surprised to find that The Yellow Van ⁴ is founded upon a thesis. Consequently, one is not satisfied that the characters are really alive, though they appear to lack none of the signs of life ; they fit somewhat too neatly into their several niches, they are too obviously parts of a well-ordered machinery. The incidents also carefully contribute to the establishment of the author’s proposition as to the total depravity of the English land law. Yet the story is not at all dull. It deserves whatever praise can be given to a spirited tract, and may very likely do more for the cause which it. represents than a score of parliamentary speeches or a hundred leading articles could hope to do. The late Frank Norris said a novel must do one of three things : tell something, show something, or prove something ; and that the greatest novels do all of these things. As to the propriety of this third function the world remains in two minds. It is inclined to think, perhaps, that Mr. Norris’s own work suffered not a little from his desire to prove something.

From its title one might suspect The Mills of Man ⁵ to be either didactic or morbid; it is neither. It tells things and shows things, but attempts to prove nothing ; this, at least, is the old-fashioned way of holding the mirror up to Nature. It tells the story of a political campaign in Illinois, but I am not able to think of it as a political novel. The phase of politics seems to have been taken almost by chance as background for the author’s picture of life in our great inland centre. The thing he shows is more important than the thing he tells, and his freedom from political partisanship, from petty local pride, from the rigid attitude of the moralist, gives one a sense of unusual freedom in the enjoyment of the picture. A conscious detachment from the conventional point of view is the only sign of bias which we note ; and it is never carried to the point of irresponsibility. One of the leading figures is a political boss, who prides himself upon being “ the Croker of Chicago; ” an illiterate, unscrupulous, and lovable man. Another is a great financier, also unscrupulous so far as the world can see, but really a man of fine compunctions, observing in his manipulations a law which to him seems right. Still more striking is the figure of Hildegarde Brown, promoter, Bohemian, and “ new woman ; ” a type which, one would think, could not be made at once true and attractive; yet this is accomplished. We have said that the author displays no petty local pride ; Chicago has significance for him less as a place than as a symbol: — “ Thus Chicago beckoned ahead of him, looming monstrous, ugly and almighty. It was the archetypical industrial city, the complete representative of the modern age, as Rome had been of the ancient world, and Venice of the Renaissance. There was no past about it, even near, no towers, traditions, temples. It was built upon the naked prairie, built of steel. Possessed of colossal barbarities, its glories were meats and grains and metals. It had invented the bridge style of architecture, the stockyards, and the whaleback. It reeked of industrialism ; it was a gross compound of money and of muscle. Its achievements, brutalities, energies, candors, democracies, opulences, lusts, like its products, its foods and its steel, were characteristics, unalloyed, of the age of to-day.” There are no other passages like this in the course of the narrative, and there are only a few brief touches of description here and there. The style is simple and straightforward, and the action proceeds without interruption. In no spirit of apology, therefore, is the fact to be recorded that The Mills of Man is a first novel.

IV.

The charm of a mere tale is somewhat legs certainly a charm of personality ; it is when the author begins to “show” things that he is quite sure to show himself. But a mere tale is a rare thing. It is next to impossible for a story-teller to avoid suggesting, if only by a glance or a shrug of the shoulder, his own interpretation of the facts which he has to record ; and, that point once yielded, we are free to observe that even his selection of facts is a criticism of himself. Sixty Jane,⁶ for instance, is patently the work of a sentimentalist who lacks the escapevalve of humor. The title story is really affecting, and the little uneasiness with which one reads it is only explained by the perusal of the later tales. One’s sympathy for Sixty Jane is not pushed beyond the point of propriety, but in Lucky Jim and The Little House in the Little Street Where the Sun Never Came, the pathos is of the Little Nell order, the product of a method which makes a point of “ crowding the mourners.” Those who have tears and are prepared to shed them can ask for no better opportunity than Mr. Long’s book affords.

His one or two experiments at humorous narrative are not successful. Their artificiality is especially unpleasing to one who has just been chuckling over the adventures of Messrs. Sudd Lannigan and Clarence O’Shay.⁷ The cosmopolitan Irishman has had other worthy spokesmen, notably Mr. Mulvaney and Mr. Dooley ; Mr. Lannigan is their equal in his own way. His creator has chosen not to represent the brogue by any elaborate system of misspelling: the public ought indeed by this day to be able to roll its own r’s and transpose its own vowels with sufficient ease. Mr. Fernald contents himself with suggesting, by a skillful adherence to the Hibernian syntax and diction, the swing and the intonation of Mr. Lannigan’s speech. These stories are the best of material for reading aloud. A Hard Road to Andy Coggin’s is the funniest of them, and The Lights of Sitka is the most serious ; and underneath them all runs a vein of sentiment so quiet and restrained that admirers of Sixty Jane will be likely to overlook it altogether.

The series of stories by Seumus MacManus ⁸ is of less bulk and narrower range than either of the foregoing collections. Once more the story-teller is an Irishman, not this time a young, rollicking adventurer from the south of Ireland, but a reticent, ironical old gamekeeper of Donegal. The grim and halfreluctant humor, the dramatic gusto, with which he records the exploits of an ancient foe, give his narrative more power than the slight character of its theme would appear to warrant. Facts and fancies, after all, have in themselves very little value for literature or for any other art. They may catch our attention and applause for the moment, but the personality behind them is what we really care for in the end.

H. W. Boynton.